from 18 December 2017 to 21 December 2017
5.00-7.00 pm • Aula SPECOLA
“Violence always needs justification,” wrote Hannah Arendt in her reflections On violence (1970). Understanding how justifications for violence are articulated by their perpetrators reveals the order of political meanings driving violence, its ideological underpinnings, and the way in which in this process certain mechanisms of power and domination are reproduced. In other words, interrogating how the use of force is deployed through marshaling certain discursive apparatuses helps explaining the ethics of violence.
Students will read the work of critical thinkers coming from different disciplinary backgrounds like Lila Abu-Lughod, Hannah Arendt, Mahmood Mamdani, Judith Butler, Banu Bargu, Grégoire Chamayou, Talal Asad, Eyal Weizman, with the aim of engaging with a specific counterintuitive angle of reflection on the ethics of violence: how have liberal discourses on human rights, humanitarianism, and international law been increasingly lending themselves to the reproduction of violence and domination?
The course will tackle this epistemological and political question using different examples from contemporary contexts of conflicts and violence, from the Italian colonial war in Ethiopia, through the multi-decennial Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, to the Mediterranean crisis and the repressive turn against the NGOs that succor migrants in the sea. The course will interrogate the puzzling consequences of the historical emergence of a contemporary ethics of violence grounded in human rights and humanitarian discourses. Is this the dead end of human rights/humanitarianism or is there any room for re-appropriating them in order to struggle against injustice?
Readings:
Lila Abu Lughod (2013), Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), Ch. 1, pp. 27-53.
Talal Asad (2000), “What do human rights do? An anthropological enquiry”, Theory & Event Vol. 4, Issue 4. Available in pdf and here https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32601
Readings:
Mahmood Mamdani (2001), “A brief history of genocide”, Transition, No. 87, pp. 26-47.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (San Diego, New York, London: Harvest Books), “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man”, pp. 290-299
Readings:
Eyal Weizman (2010), “Legislative attack”, Theory, Culture & Society 27 (6), pp. 11-32.
Banu Bargu (2013), “Human Shields”, Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 12, 4, pp. 277–295.
Non-mandatory reading: Judith Butler (2015), “Human Shields”, London Review of international Law, volume 3, Issue 2, Pages 223–243
Readings:
Judith Butler, Frames of War, (London: Verso), Introduction, “Precarious life, grievable life”, pp. 1-32
Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone (New York, London: The New Press), Chapters 14 (‘Combatant Immunity’), 15 (‘A Humanitarian Weapon’), and 16 (‘Precision’), pp. 127-149.